"ZAIRE is a good friend and
a good investment."
- Richard Nixon, toasting Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko,
1972.

"Over a period of years,
President Mobutu has been a friend of ours. We enjoy good relations
with Zaire. We have substantial commercial interests in the country."
- Jimmy Carter, press conference, March 24, 1977.

"I have come to appreciate
the dynamism that is so characteristic of Zaire and Zaireans,
and to respect your dedication to fairness and reason."
- Vice-President George Bush, visiting Kinshasa, November, 1982.

"Zaire is among America's
oldest friends and its President, President Mobutu
is one of our most valued friends. The strong ties of friendship
between Zaire and the US endure and prosper. We are proud and
very, very pleased to have you with us today." - President
George Bush, White House, June 29, 1989.

It would be instructive to know
just how many millions of Africans have died, often horribly,
because of (1) unbending US determination to smash Africa's old
but stable colonial empires and (2) Washington's plenteous patronage
of some of the most venal, corrupt and vicious despots ever inflicted
on this tormented continent.

Now, it seems, the last important
survivor of that melancholy band is doomed finally to disappear.
He is, of course, Zaire's President-for-Life, Mobutu Sese Seko,
generally regarded as Africa's most corrupt leader ever, a man
who, under US protection, has plundered and prostituted his country
for more than three decades, who has in that time reduced Zaire
(nee the Belgian Congo) to a surreal parody of a state.

Over the years there have been many
reports of Mobutu's impending departure. This time it looks for
real. On the one side, French papers report that his prostate
cancer has mestasasised into the bones. Recent photographs reflect
a shadow of the tall, imposing figure he once cut in his African
robes and trademark leopard skin torque. The Swiss, caught before,
are cautious. As recently as November, their papers reported him
as dallying with a high-price Swiss call girl.

More convincingly, his armed forces,
a shambolic rabble backed by White mercenaries, are being routed
and humiliated by a rebel force of whom few had heard only a few
months back. Kalemie, in southern Shaba province, fell on February
4, followed by Punia, Lubutu, Isiro and Faradje in the north-east.

Indications are then that Africa's
longest-serving dictator is, or has, lost his grip; that the long-feared,
long-predicted disintegration of the continent's second largest
state looms ever nearer. Should that happen, it could destabilise
the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Tanzania,
Angola and Uganda would all be affected.

There is little to be proud of in
Zaire. In the 32 unhappy years of Mobutu's rule everything that
was not nailed down - and a lot that was - has been stolen by
its insatiable, bloodsucking leaders. The IMF lists Zaire as the
world's eighth poorest state. Horsefeathers. Zaire is not poor.
It is a rich country full of poor people. There is a difference.
They are not poor because of colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism,
apartheid or any other of Africa's favourite demons.

They are poor because since 1965
they have been the playthings of a Mobutu-led clique of crooks,
buffoons, con men, scroungers, vultures and mountebanks, all so
venal, so inept, so corrupt that they would bring a blush of shame
even to the cheeks of certain SA pols we all know and love. At
independence, Zaire had all the makings of a success story.

MINERAL WEALTH

How can you call a country poor
that once produced, in abundance, coffee, rubber, palm oil, cocoa
and tea - that in the colonial days was a net exporter of food?

A huge country, with a land surface
of 2,35 sq million km, twice the size of SA, Zaire has fertile
soils, a generally ample rainfall, vast rain forests (second largest
in the world). With a population of 44 million (World Bank estimates)
it is not over-populated. It has a ready-made path to the interior
along the mighty Congo River.

How can you call a country poor
that is blessed with huge mineral wealth? Zaire has about 60%
of the world's reserves of cobalt, along with vast reserves of
copper, cadmium, gold, silver, tin, germanium, columbine, zinc,
iron, manganese, tungsten, bauxite, lead, phosphates, uranium
and petroleum. In 1984 industrial diamonds mined in Zaire accounted
for 40% of the free world's total production.

Suitably governed Zaire could, and
should, have been one of the richest states in the world, let
alone Africa. When Mobutu seized power in 1965, Zaire's mines,
farms and plantations were fertile, well-managed and productive,
all ticking over profitably. He soon reduced all that to utter
ruin admittedly not quite as fast as the ANC is doing in
SA, but fast enough.

His regime, totally lacking any
experience of responsible administration, wreaked havoc by gross
mismanagement, theft and corruption - le malZairois,
the Zairean sickness. For 32 years little or nothing has been
spent on maintaining ports, roads, railways, river boats, schools,
hospitals or mines. Of 2 600 km of rail in 1960, less than 700
km still operate - after a fashion.

The bush has overgrown the Belgian
roads and power grids. Land communication today is practically
non-existent. Government health expenditure constitutes only 0,8%
of the gross national product; education, 0,4%. What middle class
once existed has totally disappeared. Food production and employment
are both lower than at independence.

SEETHING CAULDRON

In the trackless bush, where millions
of peasants and tribesmen live, the scourge of leprosy, sleeping
sickness and malaria are again pandemic, all compounded by rampant
AIDS. Zaire's per capita income, among Africa's lowest, is around
R400 a year, and declining, as the population increases at 3%
or more a year. One could go on. But you get the picture.

The Zaire of today is a seething
cauldron of poverty, disease, squalor and violence, with millions
of its people having reverted to the Iron Age. And, whatever Zaire
has become, economically, socially, politically, the US carries
a huge share of the blame. Today, as Time magazine has
remarked, Zaire is little more than a gutted memorial to the greed
of its leaders. As is ever more the case with SA, the great Central
African state provides a case study of the hoax of African independence.

Born in 1930, his father a mission
cook, Army Sergeant Joseph Desire first came to public notice
in 1960, when the Belgians - under UN and US pressure - withdrew
precipitously from their outsize Central African holdings. With
the CIA's help, Mobutu stepped into the power vacuum that followed
the country's chaotic independence, to be soon followed by Dag
Hammarskjold's disastrous UN intervention.

Staging a bloodless coup, he took
power, only to hand it back to a civilian President, Patrice Lumumbu.
The next year this worthless scoundrel was assassinated. Mobutu,
together with the CIA, installed another president. Soon the humble
Army Sergeant was wearing a Lieut-General's flashes.

In 1965, backed by a joint US/Israeli
covert operation headed by his old friend, Lawrence Devlin, then
the CIA's station chief in Kinshasa, Mobutu seized control for
good, making himself head of state with full executive powers.
The Americans first installed him, then kept in power for the
next 32 years a regime of killers and crooks.

In his early years, the Western
media hailed Mobutu as an exemplar of the new breed of post-colonial
African leaders. And true, he did show some success in bringing
a fragile unity to this clumsy colonial creation with its monstrous
fake borders, lashing together an unlikely ragbag of 254 ethnic
groups speaking 400 dialects. Then Mobutu began reverting to type.

Following a trip to China he launched
a showy "authenticity" campaign designed to reduce Western
influence and return his country to its African roots. Many foreign
assets were nationalised, giving him tighter control over this
source of income. He began changing many Christian names, starting
with his own, to make them more "authentic."

Joseph Desire went out of the window
and in came Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Bangawa. Though
often presented in more delicate terms in the Western media, this
modest new moniker means "the cock that goes from hen to
hen knowing no fatigue." He had other self-promoting titles,
including The Guide, The Helmsman, "The Greatest Marshall
in all History," "The Great Leopard of Zaire,"
and Yamukolo Oleki Bango "You are the Strongest. You
will Suppress Everybody Else."

Soon the country was reeling under
his calamitous "Zaireanisation" measures of 1973, when
he seized the assets of all Belgian firms in Zaire. Biggest of
these was Gecamines, the massive mining conglomerate in Shaba
Province, whose coffers Mobutu proceeded to treat as his own personal
bank account. By 1993 Gecamine's earnings from copper and cobalt
had fallen by nearly 75%. Gecamines collapsed in 1995 from plunder,
pillage and ethnic cleansing by pro-Mobutu forces. "Without
Gecamines, they're back in the Stone Age," commented one
Belgian financial investment adviser. The World Bank had already
ceased all operations in the country.

The one who did not get any poorer
was, obviously, Mobutu. In his years of absolute power, he stuffed
billions into "special accounts" in Luxembourg, Brussels,
Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, London and the Bankers Trust, New York.
He himself reputedly owned a Swiss bank at one time. His personal
fortune, built on a network of private businesses, the ransacking
of public resources and the pilfering of foreign aid that flowed
into the country (mostly courtesy the US taxpayer) has been variously
estimated at US$5-to $10-billion.

For the sheer scale of his theft,
Mobutu can hardly be said to have a rival in history. Again and
again he compromised himself with his ostentatious life style
and immense wealth. In France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Switzerland,
Portugal, Senegal and Ivory Coast, he owned more than 30 castles,
luxury villas and apartments.

VERSAILLES

In recent years Mobutu governed
from his native fiefdom of Gbadolite, a jungle village close to
the equator and perched on the northernmost banks of the River
Congo. Gbadolite, which at huge cost he transformed into the "Versailles
of the Jungle," was the one area of Zaire that worked and
prospered reasonably well.

Mobutu was always misleadingly modest
about his wealth. When pressed, he would swear on his "honour
as a Christian and a chief" that his available funds amounted
"no more than $50 million." "I would estimate it
to be less than $50 million," he said in 1988. "What
is that after 23 years as head of State of such a big country?"

As is customary in so much of Africa,
he was routinely elected by 98% of the vote.

How did he get away with it for
so long? His greatest asset always was that he himself was regarded
as an asset by the CIA. His relations with the CIA have been legendary.

Although his rule hardly represented
a shining example of Grecian democracy, in the abstract make-believe
world of the State Department, he also had his supporters. That
was particularly so in 1994, when he returned to the West's good
books by providing camps and logistical support for the Rwandan
refugees.

APOCALYPSE

Can any man be a second Mobutu,
holding together a country of so many different tribes? Just who
could replace him is far from clear. Mobutu has been careful not
to groom a successor, cultivating instead a policy of divide and
rule. What calibre of man they have among the rebel forces is,
as yet, unknown.

Mobutu himself has often predicted
apocalypse for Zaire after his departure. He could be proved right.
For all practical purposes Zaire itself no longer exists as a
state entity. If the fragile remains of Zaire's central authority
do collapse, the continental impact could be bloodchilling. Almost
all of Zaire's Great Lakes neighbours are already in a state of
acute turmoil. If Zaire now also falls apart, it could make the
genocide in Rwanda and Burundi look like a sideshow.